These teachings relate generally to alignment tolerant optical interconnects and, more particularly, to bidirectional channels incorporated into optical interconnects such as the Optical Data Pipe (ODP). The optical data pipe technology is described in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 7,015,454, incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, and related cases.
In one embodiment of the optical interconnect system or optical data pipe approach of U.S. Pat. No. 7,015,454, mating emitter and detector arrays are pre-aligned and fixed on or near the ends of a gradient index rod imager, and this flexible pre-aligned structure is then mounted to the host. In another embodiment infinite conjugate imagers are used to produce Optical Data Pipe modules that are useful for interconnecting chips, boards, backplanes, etc. with generous alignment tolerances in all degress of freedom. Using these technologies hundreds or thousands of high bandwidth channels can be interconnected for short distances (intra-die, between neighboring chips or MCMS), board to board, board to backplane, or over relatively long distances (full board wrap-around, board-to-board, computer to peripheral, computer to computer, etc.). The optical interconnect system of U.S. Pat. No. 7,015,454 provides a nearly lossless one-to-one optical interconnection from a set of input channels to a set of output channels, and supports extreme density, low power, and low crosstalk for high bandwidth signals.